Last night, TechCrunch reported that Twitter was hacked by a group claiming to be the “Iranian Cyber Army.” As far as we know, no sensitive user information was compromised during the attack. The technical explanation of what happened to Twitter is that the site’s DNS records were compromised, which means that instead of accessing Twitter, people were redirected to a different site with pro-Iranian government messages.
At the New York Times Lede Blog, Robert Mackey pieces together the attack and explains how it is related to greater issues related to the recent Iranian elections.
According to one of Mr. Arrington’s sources, while the Google result for Twitter was showing the hacked message in English, it was accompanied by a sub-heading in Persian which said, roughly, “In the name of God, as an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter’s sly interference which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country.”
At the height of the post-election demonstrations against Iran’s government in the summer, the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled interruption of the service for maintenance, after opposition supporters expressed fear that the disruption would interfere with their protests.
In Iran on Friday, as Reuters reports, supporters of the government attended public rallies the opposition decided to boycott. According to the news agency, pro-government crowds chanted slogans against the leader of country’s opposition, Mir Hussein Moussavi, including, “Death to Moussavi” and “Moussavi should be executed.”
While Twitter is now functioning normally, and no sensitive information seems to have been compromised, we would advise you to change your Twitter password, just in case. Odds are good that your password is due for a change anyway, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it now. For tips on putting together a strong password, check out this advice from Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik.
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